This exercise is drawing from a framework that describes a deep shift in the way we can relate to tragedy in our lives, which may take place over years or decades. (You can read more about this stance here or listen to a conversation here.)
For our purposes here, we’ll build off of and adapt this model, to point at this process on smaller scales, as it shows up in our daily life.
Imagine you were in a car accident and became paralyzed from the neck down. There may be technological advances that could give you some representation of normal mobility, but you will never experience what you did beforehand.
This kind of a shift would require a profound grieving and adjustment process.
We may also face this process on more subtle layers. Examples:
- You and your life partner face a fundamental difference in how you want to live. You still desire and choose to live together, but the life either of you imagined with the difference not being there is not a possibility. There may be compromises and ways at addressing underlying needs, but there still may be something fundamentally unattainable for both of you.
- You experience a health situation that changes things such that you are chronically fatigued, and cannot do the things you were dreaming of doing with your life in the same way. You may find some support through exploring different health avenues, and something may shift, but perhaps it will never be how it was before AND you cannot change the fact that this is what is here in this moment and for the foreseeable indefinite future.
- You realize you experience intergenerational trauma, and it impacts very deep and fundamental ways that you experience and perceive reality. You may enter a learning & healing process to meet more of your experience and learn to transform /integrate it and you may experience some of these fundamental perceptual impacts for the rest of your life, with awareness that you’re not able to choose to step into something different. (Some processes of human development happen across lifetimes or civilizational epochs.)
In its essence, there are three phases involved in working with the immense grief of facing tragedies we cannot change or avoid.
Pre-tragedy is the phase before we experience or realize that we’re in the reality we’re in. In the example of the partnership, this fundamental difference may have always been there, without having been uncovered by us. In this phase, we are blissfully ignorant and generally feeling easeful about life.
Tragedy is when the reality of the situation becomes apparent to us. We don’t feel accepting of it, we are in the denial / anger / grief / resistance of what is so. Things might feel like they’re unraveling at the seams. We fight it. We don’t want this to be the reality we’re living in. We may feel like giving up, with no hope and no clarity on how we’ll organize our lives with this tragic situation.
In this phase, we need to grieve. We need to allow our emotions to unfold and get big and be with ourselves in the depths of whatever pain is there.
Post-tragedy is a phase that can emerge out of this process. It is not a phase without tragedy and grief. We still feel the pain, and missing and longing for another experience, but we feel this within a larger frame of okayness. We feel connected to our vitality and clarity. We feel connected to something larger, that this local tragedy is embedded within and a part of. Because of this, we can work with the tragic situation, not solving it, but adapting to it; accepting it.
When we reach this stage, there is a profound letting go and letting be. The interesting thing here is that in the process of leaning in we might arrive at a insight such as “Oh! This may never change, and that’s got to be okay, because it is just what is so”. This can open up vast domains of agency that we didn’t have access to in the resistance. Which, paradoxically, can actually allow different kinds of change and adaptation that make the whole situation different.
We don’t always find ourselves landing here. In some cases, we continue to feel ‘stuck’ in our reality, resistant to it, looking for escape, or numbing out to it.
The emergence of this state comes from allowing the emotional process to be so, to express through it, while developing access to something larger, that becomes the seat in which you live.
Note: There are some mindset tools you can use to practice a different relationship with our situation. You can check out the Transcending Mistakes & Reframing Failure activity to explore more.